We managed 2 out of the planned 3 NaNo games, Lluvia wasn’t able to make it because the artist(s) had technical difficulties. The script has been done so it’ll be released eventually. Reverse Robin has also been out for a while, and it somehow makes sense despite being so disjointed.

As for Left of Center, the 6 endings that I promised weren’t able to make it. It is still playable and I would love it if you could still give it a go, I’m very happy with it despite all the difficulties throughout March. I’ll be adding in the extra stuff I promised as well as a “route” for Dr. Jazz Hands and 10 more epilogues with the ones planned (sometimes I ask myself why too) now that I don’t have a deadline looming over my shoulders.

We also didn’t mention this before in our last blog post because we didn’t think we’d participate in it. Honestly? PPHS Jam right after a month long game jam sounded like a ridiculous plan, but somehow we still found ourselves doing it. Gutsy did an abstract poetic Twine game called Conium to celebrate National Poetry Month, it’s a fun read about two people writing a poem together and enjoying each other’s company.

Meanwhile, I got roped into a group with 7 other insane devs and formed Team Snugglebunny (check here for the full list of names) to make Night at the Hospital, a BL game about spooks and snuggling. We missed the jam deadline by 2 days but I think it was worth it. The tumblr blog linked above doesn’t have the posts from the jam since I used the TTG tumblr to post updates. This was supposed to be a small thing. Yeah, I have no idea when or how it got big but NatH has been a hit with over 860+ DLs at the time of writing since its release 5 days ago. We already have a German translation and now we’re discussing the possibility of voice acting and adding in 2 extra endings. Check out the Snugglebunny blog for more info on that.

So what’s next? Finishing Left of Center definitely and then all those other projects I signed myself up for. Admittedly, TWCC’s been on hold because of them but it’s not an entirely bad thing; I’ve learned a lot from doing other projects and it’ll make TWCC all the better in the long run. In the meantime, there’s already plenty of other games to play, no?

NaNoRenO 2013 is counting down and we’re in the middle of March! We’ve been working on three games this year and progress is good so far. Let’s talk about them!

Lluvia de Peces! is Funnyguts’s project this year, and it’s about a yearly phenomenon in Honduras.

Nearly two decades after leaving her home in Yoro, Adelita is taking a vacation and has decided to visit her parents back home. When she arrives in Tegucigalpa she runs into an old friend, Ciro, who’s spent his life working around Yoro. He offers to drive her back to Yoro, and recommends that she join in the festivities that should be starting soon, once the first big rainstorm of the season comes. While Adelita remembers the yearly rain of fish, and childhood memories gathering up the stranded fish, this will be her first time in the country since Yoro created a festival to celebrate it in the late ’90s…

The script stands at approximately 5500 words right now, with one more scene being added in so the wordcount is likely to go up.

Reverse Robin is another project that Funnyguts is running. Like your usual Round Robin stories, everyone adds in their own piece to tell a story; the twist here is that the first piece of the story was the end!  Everyone else writes a scene connecting to the previous entry and tries to reach the beginning. It’s an experiment that’s bound to lead to interesting results and anyone can join in! Yes, that includes you dear reader. Contact her by PM on LSF or comment on this blog post to get in touch.

Finally, Left of Center is my project this year and it’s proving to be huge. Don’t believe me? The folder is about 165MB right now and that doesn’t even include all the music I need for an in-game music player that you guys can click to change songs. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If you don’t care about file size, then here’s a Lint Report:

The game contains 1,075 dialogue blocks, containing 14,550 words and 78,016
characters, for an average of 13.5 words and 73 characters per block.

The game contains 27 menus, 0 images, and 16 screens.

I’ve been good on writing at least 1K words a day and I’m on Day 4 out of 6, so if I speed up a bit I’ll have a good enough time to edit and have others proofread. “But what’s it about?” Well, click on the thread :V I’ll end this bit with a concept sketch by moondeertribe of two characters. It should speak for itself.

And so that’s our NaNo line up this year. We’ll be setting up pages after March ends and the games are done, so keep track of those threads for the latest news. Moya out!

“Will you love me forever?”
William and Shirley love each other with all their heart and have been going strong for quite some time, but one misunderstanding later and an irreversible tragedy occurs. Even after this, will their love stand the test of time?

Download for all OSes here. Credits are inside the game.

It’s finally done :’D Doing this was good coding practice for me and I got a lot of experience slimming down code. If anyone checks the source code (which is open, I actually want people to check that out) you can see what I’ve done to it.

In other news, we’re making progress on TWCC-related things.

A procession of the boys, going where? We just don’t know. These are the flat colors right now, everything should be shaded in nicely by Rei.

After a bit of discussion, we’re also finally opening up our dev forum for others to join. It’s over here, and if you’re wondering why we used to have separate boards for fans and the team, it’s because we wanted the forum to integrate with the website as much as possible. It wasn’t as efficient as we would have liked, so here we are now. We’ll be posting more insider info there so it’s to your benefit that you join. What are you waiting for? Go go go!

Besides this new title screen, all the content is the same. If you didn’t participate in judging for AdComp, you should check it out! Download Anniversaries, Adversity, and Pepper for Mac/Win/Linux combined.

I’ve also been working on a short story of mine that’s… over a year old? I actually wrote the script a long time ago as a way to break out of writer’s block one day, and I wanted to finish it up for the last NaNoRenO (that was back in March, whoa!) but I couldn’t find the time. Not that I was putting effort into it back then; it was going to be intentionally messy and horrible. It’s getting a reboot with help from Mink, and it actually doesn’t look half bad.

Right now it’s all free resources. Who says those are bad? I tried to stay away from the  stuff that’s been overused to hell and back (I’m looking at you, Incompetch. Even if your music is good it’s been floating around the OELVN scene too much). The only custom assets it needs should be a title screen and some chibis, and the script only needs a little bit added to it. It’s essentially done and shouldn’t take too long to finish.

And welp, 2013? That seems so surreal to me now that I think about it. Where’d you go, 2012? Hopefully it’ll be a better year, so see you then!

We’re also hard at work at That’s the Way the Cookie Crumbles. We’re really close to completing that side story we promised for your support, and we’re also hoping to seek out beta testers for the simulation portions in the main game once the new year rolls around. There’s been coloring for sprites too:

Why if it isn’t that panda we keep showing you- wait what? Pandas are black and white you say? Who cares, it’s a doll. All will be explained eventually.

Finally, Funnyguts (that’s me) completed an entry for the 2012 Adversity Competition, The Spirit of Disaster. The competition judging is finally over, so I can finally announce that my game, Anniversaries, Adversity, and Pepper, won third place! You can grab all 29 entries in one file at the forum, but I’ll be releasing a standalone version of Pepper soon. Please look forward to it, and thanks for reading!

So what’s new? Let’s start with…

The Lockdown of Shinisou Elementary now has a page on the website. This is a short horror KN by Untramen about a mysterious man who appears in front of the local elementary school. What’s he up to? It’s under 1.3k words, so it’s a quick read. Check the page to download and we hope you enjoy it!

I’m looking to port the game to the WebStory Engine since it’s only a simple KN, and though I thought I wouldn’t be able to coordinate the sound effects as nicely as they are in Ren’Py, I think I have a solution. No idea when I’ll get this done, perhaps next holiday?

In other news, Gutsy’s ready to go live with that smaller project we hinted at in the last post. It’s a gambling VN, tenatively titled Lady Luck. You play as August, a man addicted to gambling for his primary source of income. It’s not the best of ideas to hand your entire wallet to fate though. Most of the script is done and what’s left is to program and draw the art for it, as well as editing and such.

And well, that’s it I suppose. Rei’s no longer quite as busy as she was before, Rin’s still busy with school, Gutsy’s working on Lady Luck, and me? Ahahaha you’re a regular comedian, aren’t you? Those scholarships take a while you know.

Things have been a little slow lately, and I blame it all on school. Rei’s busy with college, Rin’s also busy with college, and I’m busy trying to get into college. Applications, homework and club activities aside, I haven’t had much time to sit down and write much of anything. Yeah, I’m not entirely happy either. While the lineart for the last character in the main TWCC crew is waiting to be colored, Rei’s sketching up the main menu for that side story thing we’ve been talking about for a while now. Still can’t quite promise you a release date on that since… well, you know. School.

Meanwhile, Funnyguts penned down some information about the witches in Ibuki Magica and I have to say some of the backstories are really great. There’s going to be 12 witches for you to fight, each with their own barriers and familiars. Some of the details still need some ironing out, but for the most part they’re there. Gutsy hopes that if they’re at least as good as some of the less memorable witches in PMMM, she’ll be satisfied.

We also discussed other miscellaneous team stuff, like how we could streamline that donation process and add possible pay-what-you-want buttons for our smaller games. The other day I stumbled upon this thing called Pay With a Tweet, which basically gets your customers to advertise for you on Facebook or Twitter before they buy your thing. Worry not, we’ll likely do this only with our smaller games and always provide a demo, and for those of you who don’t have FB or Twitter we’ll figure out a way to make sure you can play all our games for free.

In any case we’re moving forward at the leisurely pace of a turtle (har har), but we are working so we’ll get things done sooner or later. We promise! Gutsy may announce one of our smaller projects if she’s happy with her writing, so look forward to that in the next update!

P.S. And now you’re wondering about the post title, huh? Well, one of Omnificent’s characters will eat a spicy version of anything if he can, and he even puts hot sauce on his oatmeal because why the hell not. Unfortunately Omni doesn’t like oatmeal so he’s never tried to see if it’s even a viable combo. This morning I decided to test it out and… it’s… not terrible per se. The Sriracha sauce almost tasted sweet. Theoretically you could eat the stuff if you wanted to but… it’s hot sauce and oatmeal. They don’t clash but they don’t mix perfectly either. I’m sure you could use this as a metaphor for many things but there we are. Oh, and if you’re reading this Omni, don’t you dare lol at me and you owe me big time >:C

P.S.S. The site might be getting a makeover soon since we’ve been having people tell us things could be a little more “modern.” Hopefully things won’t get wonky or break >_> We’ll keep you posted on this if need be via Twitter.

The story is based on a Traditional Japanese’s fairy tale ‘Kaguya-hime’, also known at ‘The moon princess’ or ‘The shimmering princess’. According to some source, the story is “among the first – possibly the very first – text of any culture assuming the Moon to be an inhabited world and describing travel between it and the Earth.

You can visit her project website to learn more details!

Rin’s already drawn several concept sketches for girls of Ibuki Magica, some details are subject to change.

We hope you’re just as excited as we are to work with her!

—

On the TWCC side of things, things are crawling along slowly since Rei’s busy with college things and such. The base lineart for the final character is done, so there’s only expressions left. And after that is the main menu, which might take even longer… Two weeks to develop this was really pushing it. Hopefully it won’t take too long >_< I don’t want to set anymore estimates for fear we’ll miss it yet again, and life’s crazy too. We’ll be sure to tell you when it is ready though, so keep an eye out!

The team tossed ideas around for the $100 donation KN, and we have some ideas that we’re certain will be good. We don’t want to spoil too much, but one thing you should know about it is that someone “new” will be there. Well, to be more exact, she’s someone you should know as long as you were paying attention to the demo. That’s all I’ll say about it! Here’s a quick rough sketch of her.

And before anyone asks that doll is a panda. We hope to release the side KN two weeks from now;  keep an eye out!

9:19 also was nice enough to draw a few items for the cookbook, she’s pretty much set the standard for what they should look like. Swiss roll anyone?

I’ll probably try drawing the rest, but it’ll take a lot of practice till I can match that quality D’: We’ll just have to see how it goes.

And if anyone’s curious as to how the script is going, it’s a little hard to get an exact wordcount since all the paths are in different documents.  Not only that, but there’s a lot of self-editing all the time. One day I’ll un-learn that habit… A lot of my time is also going into the Dream’s Dénouement project, which is progressing on schedule.

That’s about it for now, don’t want to take anymore of your time babbling. Though, there is one thing! If you’re artistically inclined, likes coloring, and drawing magical girls (for Ibuki Magica), TTG is looking for another artist. Reikun’s way busy with lineart, BGs, and other miscellaneous graphics for TWCC as is, so she needs someone to color in the sprites. If you’re interested in joining our team for the long run, give us a holler!

Meanwhile, we’re crawling along slowly since all the members are juggling other projects too. We’ve fixed the textbox to remove the rainbow gradient and we’re pushing at the script. I’m working on Santos’s routes; here’s a tidbit!

“Once again, Santos is sitting by himself. I wonder…”
e “Hey.”
s “…”
e “You going to ignore me again?”
s “…”
e “Well?”
s “If I answer that question, I won’t be ignoring you. But it’s too late now.”
s “What do you need now?”
e “Break time, I need company.”
s “You have terrible taste in company then.”

We don’t question their dynamic. Till next time!